VECLabs is now accepting donations. Click the Donate link on the sidebar for details. If you like my work, and you have some spare money, feel free to donate — I wasn’t paid to develop any of the projects on this site, and if they generate a few dollars of income, it would probably encourage me to spend some more time on them. If you don’t feel like donating, that’s fine too — this site will remain free, so donations are strictly voluntary.

And the school semester finally ended a couple weeks ago, allowing me to concentrate on things besides AP tests and homework. AP Calculus BC went quite nicely (I expect a 5). AP Physics C went less well. I am told that the Physics C test was unusually hard this year, which would be consistent with my experience compared to the practice tests (on which I easily scored a 5). Results will be back in July; hopefully I at least got a 4 on Physics C (which would get me college credit). If not, I may retake Physics C. Oh well, no point dwelling on it now.

Meanwhile, Botball has restarted, in preparation for the 2008 International Botball Tournament. Nothing to report here, except that we’re hoping to pwn everybody.

I will hopefully be presenting at the 2008 Global Conference on Educational Robotics, which hosts the International Botball Tournament. Details have not been announced yet, so I won’t leak anything.

Today was my first day back in the office at my robotics programming job since last summer. My project from last summer appears to be suspended, although I still am not supposed to discuss it publicly. Finished a new small project in about 45 minutes (literally!), then moved on to another new project, which should take a bit of time before anything comes of it.

The Secret Project has seen a bit of activity, and the beta testing team keeps saying there’s a demand for it, but with Botball and work taking up my time, don’t expect a release anytime soon.

That’s pretty much all that’s up with me lately. Sorry for the lack of posts; it’s not because I’m lazy; I just didn’t have much to say. Until next time, this is Biolizard89 of VECLabs, signing off.

Today was the Botball 2008 Regional Tournament. While we didn’t win Seeding or Double Elimination, we did get some very good scores in Double Elimination, and we also won the Judge’s Choice Award for Creative Programming (the award was entirely my doing). We’ve got some great ideas for the International Tournament in July (which we will be competing in), so we’re hopeful that we’ll pwn there.

Greetings to my friends at Whittier Middle School, who scored 2nd place in Double Elimination and 3rd overall! Congrats, guys!

Also greetings to my friends at Norman North High School, who got a Judge’s Choice award for programming as well!

As of today, Biolizard89: L33t Programming Projects, Etc. is now known as Viral Electron Chaos Laboratories, AKA VECLabs! I mainly did this because I wanted a new theme, and because change is good. But the lack of trademark issues with the new name is good too, seeing as The Biolizard is owned by Sega, and that would mean that anything connected to the Biolizard name wouldn’t be usable for commercial purposes. So, my username will continue to be Biolizard89, but the site will be Viral Electron Chaos Laboratories (AKA VECLabs) from now on.

GCARS-CS Recorder v0.5.2 has been released.

* 0.5.2
Multiple PadSim players are now supported, and PadSim should now work with PC players
other than P1.
Sending large amounts of data should now be much more reliable. Errors will be shown
on the Status Bar so that you can see if your packets are getting eaten by Winsock.

I haven’t mentioned this here, but I’ve transferred to a different Botball team. The 2008 season started at the beginning of January, and we’re hard at work preparing for the regional tournament on March 1. For obvious reasons, I can’t post details here on what we’re doing, but I think we’ve got a great strategy, great bots, great engineers, and great programmers, so we should do pretty well.

I have been working on some stuff that will be posted here (hopefully soon; I’m just awaiting beta tester reports). This is unfortunately not related to the aforementioned Secret Project, which has been on the back burner for months. I think the stuff I’ve been doing will be of interest to people, though.

I got back the ACT results today. A perfect 36/36! I’m very happy with the score, enough that I was dancing around the house yelling about it for about 5 minutes. So I guess that means that I will never again be taking the ACT! Maybe I should reveal some of my secrets… nah, I’ll probably wait till I’m in college for that.

I’ve added a Tech Tip arcticle. Check it out: Downloading YouTube and Other FLV Videos.

I would like to wish everybody a happy new year. Hopefully during the upcoming year I’ll have more stuff to post here.

By the way, I took the SAT early December, and got back the results last week. 2310/2400! Still waiting on the ACT results.

This week, I’m taking the ACT for the second time. Since I already have a 35/36, my sole goal is a 36/36. I’m reasonably confident about English and Math (I did reasonably well on practice tests for them, but a little luck might help too), Science I haven’t done a practice test yet, but Reading has me slightly concerned. I got a 31 on a practice test for Reading today, which is the worst Reading score I’ve gotten since the PLAN score of 28/32 two years ago… hopefully I’ve learned from those mistakes. I’m left wondering how the heck I somehow got a perfect score on Reading last year; I’m half-convinced they graded the test wrong. The practice test wouldn’t be so bad if the passages didn’t have blatant mistakes in their content, which just ticks me off because every time I see something written down that’s just not true, my blood pressure rises a bit and my concentration lapses simultaneously. I’ve never seen such a poorly written passage on an official ACT test though, so with any luck that alone will increase my score a point or two. PSAT/SAT though… huge amount of crappily-written passages that you have to analyze to do well. Okay, done ranting.

Lots of other junk in Real Life (TM) as well, which as usual I won’t bother you with. I’m feeling guilty about the lack of progress with my Secret Project, so I may end up releasing something to beta testers soon. Don’t hold your breath, though.

Until next time, this is Biolizard89, reminding you to just remember that Q is for Qwerty….